AMA: Cortex VP of Product, Kara Gillis on Product Management vs Product Marketing

This article from HackerNoon is really great at helping you determine how to price your digital product. I am not going to dictate the organizational ownership of who owns pricing, but I will say only the function that fully understands the following should own pricing: Usage or adoption metric that drives value - does the number of people using the product matter, or do customers value how much of a product feature they're using? Competitive dynamics - has someone else already established the r ...Read More

I actually wrote about this on my blog - "Practical Advice for Breaking into Product Management" - but I'll be more specific about going from PMM to PM in this answer.The PMM-to-PM transition is one of the more natural lateral moves you can make, but it doesn't happen automatically; you have to engineer it. The biggest thing is getting extreme familiarity with the product, which means really knowing: How to demo it cold How to deploy or configure it The user journeys and target customers Use cas ...Read More

There are two primary ways I think PM and PMM share responsibilities: Product launches, just different elements of the launch. Competitive enablement, though the sales enablement around competitors may fall on one or the other, depending on the company. On launches: PM focuses on defining the problem area, the jobs to be done, and prioritizing the requirements so the solution actually solves the problem we set out to solve. PM also owns the customer feedback loop during preview programs and make ...Read More

Short answer: as early as possible: ideally at problem definition, well before you've locked in a solution. PMM's job isn't to slap messaging on a finished feature; it's to help you sharpen positioning, validate the customer benefit, and pressure-test how the enhancement lands against competitive alternatives. For meaningful enhancements (Tier 1 or Tier 2), I pull PMM in at the Problem Definition stage so they can hear customer pain points firsthand and start drafting the messaging brief in para ...Read More

PM and PMM KPIs share the same eventual outcome - revenue - but they measure very different leading indicators along the way. Think of them as two ends of the value chain: PM measures whether the product is delivering value, PMM measures whether the market is receiving it. PM KPIs tend to be in-product and customer-behavior focused: Adoption (DAU/MAU, feature adoption rate) Time to value / activation Retention and churn Conversion (free to paid, trial to close) NPS or CSAT tied to whether the JT ...Read More